Church resumes Bible study as slain pastor's body returned

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — The site of a massacre a week ago, the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is being reclaimed by parishioners who are pledging to remember the loved ones they lost in a shooting rampage while carrying on the work of the beloved pastor who was slain beside them.

"Because of our faith, we've shown up once more again to declare that Jesus lives and because he lives, we can face tomorrow," interim pastor Norvel Goff told a multiracial crowd that swayed, clapped and sang in the same room where the shooting occurred.

Workers at the church puttied over bullet holes in the wall and removed other traces of the attack before inviting the public back in, church spokeswoman Maxine Smith said.

Both of Mississippi's U.S. senators have endorsed removing the Confederate symbol from the flag the state has flown since Reconstruction — despite a 2001 endorsement of the symbol by state voters.

Other lawmakers and activists took aim at symbols including a bust of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee's Senate, a sculpture of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in the Kentucky Rotunda, the vanity license plates used by thousands of motorists, and Minnesota's Lake Calhoun.

Republican Jonathon Hill, a freshman South Carolina representative, also said the flag should remain above the monument to fallen Confederate soldiers, and that addressing it now disrespects the victims' families.

The words "Black Lives Matter" were spray-painted Wednesday on a century-old Confederate memorial in St. Louis, not far from Ferguson, Missouri, where the phrase took root after a white officer killed an unarmed black man last August.